Eli Zegers

1993

Eli Zegers had a hard time translating the visual language that he had developed as a draftsman into paint. But he turned the disadvantage into an advantage. He forgot about translating the lines he drew into paint, and focused purely on colour and on the use of painting as a medium. The only restriction that he allowed, and that he even emphasized further while painting, was the frame dictated by the shape of the canvas. Within that partly self-created framework, his paintings emerge by reacting intuitively, emotionally and associatively to what happens on the canvas while painting.
The effect of any painting depends partly on how it is experienced and interpreted by the viewer. Sometimes Zegers’ work will seem abstract, at others it will evoke associations or memories of an image previously experienced in reality. He manoeuvres in his paintings between concrete conceptualization and the evocation of thoughts and emotions in the mind of the viewer by simply capturing paint within the limits of the canvas.